A Boy and His Mother
by arekasadara
Summary: Vignettes capturing Damon's relationship with his mother and brother.
1. Chapter 1

Thoughts of the mysterious Mama Salvatore drove me to write fanfiction for the first time in something like eight years. (No, I will not reveal the penname of my 15-year-old self.) Anyway... here it is.

* * *

~1~

"What is it, my angel?"

Damon leaned into her hand as she gently fondled his hair. It was unusually warm for so late in the month, and she could feel a light dew of sweat moistening the boy's head. She knew her touch was one of few ways to calm her son down from a temper or terror, but at her question the boy frowned and continued to wrinkle the bit of her skirt he had been absently gripping. The silence lengthened, so she brought her hand out of his hair and down; she tipped his chin up, coaxing him to meet her eyes. At last he relented, and two bright blue eyes met her own.

_What could trouble an innocent so?_ she wondered, feeling the unease radiate from his body and seeing it confirmed in his furrowed brow.

Barely audible, Damon finally spoke. "Do you think he will like me?"

_Bless his heart,_ she thought, feeling at once relieved and strangely inclined to weep. Thus moved, she pulled Damon closer, hugging him to her. She took his hand and brought it to rest atop her swollen belly, where her unborn child slept.

"Your new brother, or new sister, will love you, sweet Damon," she said, her hand resting on top of his. "You need only love him in return, and the rest will follow."

Her words appeared not to soothe his mind, for the boy's body did not relax.

"But will he _like_ me, mama?" He freed his hand from hers, but did not take it away. Rather, he sat up, brought his other hand to her belly, and neared his face to it as though holding a soothsayer's orb, trying to glean truth from its depths. "I do so want him to like me."

Suddenly the unborn child awoke and stretched lazily within her; she felt the stroke of an arm or leg sweep against the taut layer of skin protecting it. Damon, too, seemed to awaken with wonder and astonishment. He snatched his hands away and sat up straight, turning wide-eyed to his mother.

"What happened? Did I hurt him?"

She chuckled, warmed by his concern. "He likes the sound of your voice. Here." She drew him close once more and guided his hand back to its former position. "Say something else. He can hear you."

Damon looked dubious, but could not deny his curiosity. Tentatively, he brought his face close, as before.

"Hello, brother... or sister," he said. "It's me. I'm your brother, Damon."

The child made another long, probing sweep against the wall of her womb, though this time Damon did not shy away. Instead, he smoothed his small fingers over the place where he had felt his sibling, as though to reciprocate the gesture. Keeping his hand on the spot, Damon finally relaxed into her side as the worry seeped out of his little body.

Feeling relieved herself, she resumed stroking her firstborn's head, fingering the soft, curled black locks as her eyes fell shut, and together they drowsed in the afternoon rays of the late October sun.


	2. Chapter 2

~2~

Tracks of tears stained his cheeks, for her hand had not been there to wipe them away, and he felt the more helpless for the salty stickiness they left behind. The echoes of her screams rang in his ears; they had tormented him far more than could any shadow in the night, and he could not quite reconcile his mother's soft, kind face with her cries that had torn the night apart.

The house was silent now. Lettie and Dinah had restrained him in the nursery, insisting he could not see his mother "until it was over". How could they be so calm when something had so clearly gone wrong? He could not fathom what could have hurt his mother so, or how anyone could allow it to persist for hours on end.

Dinah, who had left just minutes ago while Lettie cradled him, returned.

"You go now to your mother, little master," she said softly. "She ready to see you now."

Damon leapt from Lettie's arms and threw himself out into the hallway. His father would approve of neither his crying nor his undignified dash down the corridor, but Damon found that he could not care about anything but seeing his mother with his own two eyes.

He ground to a halt in front of the door to his parents' quarters, which had been left ajar. Cautiously he pushed it open, and an early dawn light spilled out into the dark hall, illuminating his pale hand on the knob. His mother lay utterly still in the large bed; she looked so small that the wilted bedclothes might at any moment swallow her whole. At the creak of the door, though, she opened her eyes and smiled briefly, as though her face could not hold it for long.

"My angel," she breathed.

Damon found his legs and ran to her, catapulting himself onto the bed. Dinah made a noise of protest behind him - he hadn't realized that she had followed him from the nursery - but his mother whispered, "It's all right. Let him."

He crawled across the damp sheets and buried his head under her arm. He felt strangely too large, too active for this still figure cradling him, but she was home to him, and he let his worry bide. She smelled different, peculiar almost, as though some great change had occurred in his absence, and a new worry crossed his mind. Resurfacing, he saw that her belly, so round and protuberant the day before, was now much reduced in size beneath the linen.

With her uncanny ability to answer his questions before he could ask them, she said, "Would you like to meet your brother, Damon?"

Movement from the corner of the room caught his eye, and for the first time he noticed an unfamiliar woman sitting in the chair there, a small bundle in her arms. She arose then, and slowly made her way to the bed. His mother lifted her arms to receive the precious cargo, and Damon saw the contents within the swaddled cloth begin to move.

Entranced, he leaned closer, and there he saw the absolute smallest person he had ever laid eyes upon. He was miniature in every way: his strange wrinkled fingers flexed and closed in a constant hypnotic motion, while his tiny hole of a mouth gaped open. His closed eyes completed the impression that this small creature sought to experience the world around him by feeling and tasting the air, rather than seeing it.

Damon instinctively lifted his hand to touch him, but caught himself and froze before turning to his mother for approval. She smiled, took his hand in her free one, and brought them to rest lightly against the downy-haired infant's head.

It was softer even than his mother's finest silk gown. He could summon no comparison for the delicate, feathery texture except for the memory of once successfully catching a butterfly. Its wings had beat against the cage of his hands, and he had sensed then that one false move would mark the creature's demise. It was so now that Damon, feeling a quick pulse just beneath the skin of his brother's fragile skull, felt an almost overwhelming sense of power that frightened him as much as it drove him to continue stroking the little head. Always he felt what he knew in his mind push back against the pull of some deeper desire, and always his turmoil was calmed by a mothering touch on his face, or a soothing hand on his shoulder.

"Did he hurt you?" The question felt even more absurd on his tongue than it had seemed in his thoughts, but it burst out of him as he remembered the long screams that preceded his brother's debut.

"No, my own," she murmured. "A child brings life with him to the world. Any pain attending his arrival is incidental. You need not worry yourself about it, mm?"

Gazing at his brother's guileless face, the unwanted doubt dissipated. Damon rested his head against his mother's breast, feeling the weight of a sleepless night pull at his eyelids. He fought against it, but knew it would take him unwillingly at any moment. Wanting one last question answered, his voice was muffled by his mother's dressing gown as he asked, "What do we call him?"

Balancing on the precipice between sleep and wakefulness, he heard his mother say, "Let us call him Stefan," before he slipped over the edge to blissful unknowing.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: I wanted to update sooner, but got caught up writing a later chapter... so you can have that to look forward to :)**

~3~

Damon couldn't sleep. His bedroom seemed to draw his infant brother's cries into it; they slithered in under the door as a soft, fitful stirring, then crescendoed into a piercing wail that came to blast right into his ear. He could hear a nursemaid tending to the child, but always after the cry had already shocked Damon back awake. He suspected that at this rate he would not dream a single dream the entire night.

By some early hour, moonlight illumined his room with a distracting brightness. Too gone with exhaustion, he did not rise to draw the curtain, but rather turned in his bed with his eyes squeezed shut, willing himself to oblivion. What seemed like hours, though were probably minutes later, Damon saw his brother's face inside his mind's eye, awake and content, uttering not a sound. Stefan was usually, in fact, a pleasant baby. In his fading thoughts, Damon wondered what bothered the child this particular night.

A sudden scream broke the night. With a sharp intake of breath, Damon started awake once more, and before he even knew what he was doing, he was up and out of his bed, storming out of his room and into the nursery, preparing in his barely-awake temper to reprimand his brother for his selfish shrieking.

The door of the nursery stood ajar. Damon edged inside, guided by the sounds emerging from a cradle across the room. He didn't feel he knew a lot about babies, but even Damon recognized that this cry was unfamiliar, and not the usual sound his brother made when unhappy.

Reaching the bassinette, he peered inside. The moonlight drained color from every surface, but he imagined the infant's face to be a ripe red to match his squinting eyes and distorted, screeching mouth.

"What is the matter with you?" Damon asked in a loud whisper. "I'm trying to sleep!"

The only change this admonition inspired was a renewed vigor to his brother's cries, who seemed not to care at all that he might have disturbed anyone's sleep. Damon huffed with frustration and reached into the cradle. The shadow cast by his own arm confused his destination, and his hand met not his brother's soft body, but the inside wall of the cradle. Something sharp pricked his thumb and he drew his hand back swiftly in surprise, hissing at the sharp pain.

Just then footfalls sounded behind him and Damon turned to find his mother entering the room.

"My angel. Did your brother wake you?"

Damon barely heard her question. "There's something in his bed. It pricked me." He held out his hand, as proof. She reached out to take it.

"Oh, my dear, I am so sorry," she said, rubbing his fingers between her hands. "Thankfully it did not draw blood." She bent to kiss Damon's fingers, then released him and touched a hand to his back. "Do you think that might be what has upset your brother?"

Damon supposed it might be, but his mother didn't wait for a response. She bent to the cradle and lifted Stefan out of it, drawing him close to her bosom. The babe, sensing comfort and imminent nourishment, refocused his energy into kneeding his mother's breast, his searching mouth emitting no more than half-hearted whimpering.

Damon watched her take his brother across the room to the rocking chair, where she sat and with one hand pulled the ribbon at the neck of her nightgown. She pulled the neckline low, exposing a breast that glowed milky white in the moonlight. With growing fascination, Damon watched his brother fasten himself to his mother with a pint-sized ferocity and begin to suck, drawing nourishment from her with blissful, silent abandon. Thus settled, his mother spoke almost absently, a hand supporting her infant son's head.

"I wanted to keep him with us," she said softly, "but your father thought we would be disturbed less if he slept in the nursery. Not so, I think."

Damon sat on a stool beside the rocker and for several quiet minutes watched his brother guzzle his fill. His mother broke the silence, after a time.

"I held you so once, Damon. You do not remember it, but I do, every time I have you in my arms. I remember holding you when I hold your brother, and it's a kind of gift you give to him. I have loved you so dearly that I wanted another, that you might never be alone."

At last the infant slowed his voracious feeding and fell away from her breast, replete with a full belly, his recent trauma naught but a forgotten dream as he slept. Damon felt drowsy himself, eyes heavy with the rest they craved. He did not notice his mother right her gown, nor the whisper of her feet touching the floor as she stood. As in a waking dream, he stood at the touch of her hand on his elbow and crossed out of the nursery toward bed and rest. As his head sank against a pillow and a blanket materialized up around him, he might have said, "Stefan can sleep with me," but he could not remember later if he had spoken the words aloud or merely dreamt them.


End file.
